Recommendations from our site
“There’s a murder investigation and there are two cities that exist side by side, overlapping each other. Their relationship is unclear right at the beginning: they occupy the same geographical space, theoretically in Eastern Europe, but they are two different cities by custom and law. If something comes from one city into the other, it’s called breaching. And breaching is considered a crime worse than murder. It’s one of those books where you just don’t even know what genre it is. This book messed with my brain so much.” Read more...
Mary Robinette Kowal, Novelist
“In The City & the City there is a supernatural force that comes in and yanks people out of reality if they break the rules of the mutually agreed upon imperception of the overlapping cities. It’s completely ridiculous, but Miéville builds the entire world around it…The basic idea is that you’ve got these two warring factions within a city. It’s been decades, maybe hundreds of years, but at some point the two different factions within the city had a treaty and they agreed to coexist and continue living in the same city. But they agreed to never, never pay attention to each other. So the citizens are part of the same physical world, but they live in two different perceptual worlds. They share the same roads, they live in the same buildings, but they have all agreed not to pay attention to each other. That active not-paying-attention is actually active. If you’re driving down a road and you have to swerve around a car that belongs to a citizen of the other faction, you cannot reflect upon, or even think about, why you just swerved round. You have to trick yourself into thinking that you moved out of the way not to actively avoid something, but just because.” Read more...
The best books on Surrealism and the Brain
Bradley Voytek, Medical Scientist
